Thursday, December 15, 2016

What Is Amazon Marketing Services, and Should I Be Using It? (Part 1)

Amazon Marketing Services
(AMS) is the newest marketing opportunity that you can utilize as an author.
You must have an Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) account to participate.
The best benefit of AMS is that your advertisements will be seen by buyers who
are kindle readers.

Unlike Facebook Ads, which
can cost you hundreds of dollars in advertisements to people who do not own a
kindle, AMS offers you the opportunity to define your audience to a very
specific group of people—readers who use kindle apps or platforms, and readers
who buy books on Amazon.

You can be assured that by
using AMS you will have the best opportunity to acquire sales from kindle
readers. No other advertising platform can offer such a defined market—not even
the infamous, Bookbub!

One of the great benefits to
AMS, is that it allows you to customize the keywords that you are targeting.
For one of my recent adds, I imported a list of over 1000 keywords and phrases
that covered every conceivable and searchable term or chain of words related to
my topic.

AMS reports specifically on
the success of each keyword, showing you how many impressions the keyword
delivered, how many clicks came as a result of the keyword, and how many sell
throughs were associated with that keyword. No other marketing platform can
give those kind of specific details.

Every promotion and
marketing service has its strengths and weaknesses, but for an author with
books listed on Amazon, AMS is currently providing excellent results. I highly
suggest it at this time.

Be forewarned, as with any
marketing opportunity, overtime as more people begin to use AMS it will become
less effective at delivering results, but for now it is still providing a
wonderful return on your investment.

Cyle Young is thankful God blessed him with the uniqueness of being an ADD-riddled…SQUIRREL!...binge writer. Not much unlike the classic video game Frogger, Cyle darts back and forth between various writing genres. He crafts princess children’s stories, how-to advice for parents, epic fantasy tales, and easy readers.

The program offers two marketing options--Sponsored Products and Product Display Ads, both of which are confusing to me. An author must choose "bid amounts," as well as how much we're willing to spend on the campaign. I have no idea what to pick or which option would be best. Can you help clarify the differences?

For example, if I'm offering my book for FREE for three days, would I want Sponsored Products with a $100 budget minimum? In Product Display Ads--which is less expensive, from what I can tell--an author can select a date range, but the campaign lasts for months. Also, what "bid price" do you select per click?

I prefer sponsored product ads, because you can highly target with keywords. I set my bid price low to maximinize my opportunities for less competitive keywords. I set $0.25 as bid price but usually pay $0.10-$0.17 each click.